Fixed Capital has a major role in economic growth literature and on the estimation of potential output using a production function - which is essential to design macroeconomic policy. One of the main contributions of this work, differently from the previous works, is to estimate the capital...

How does contagion risk affect the business cycle? We find that the presence of contagion risk significantly alters the transmission of standard macroeconomic shocks. Relative to the first-best equilibrium, the contagion externality significantly reduces the response of output to a technology...

This paper studies how wealth and health inequalities have interacted with the Covid-19 epidemic in a way that has reinforced inequalities in income, savings, epidemic risk and even individual preventive behaviors. We present in more detail two papers and their theoretical and empirical results....

The COVID-19 is having an unprecedented impact in the commercial and trade sphere globally. Businesses of all sizes are finding it difficult to operate efficiently and many struggle to meet contractual obligations. Agency is a ubiquitous concept in trade and commerce. The sudden implosion of...

TANF and SNAP cases increased by 3.4 million between March and June 2020, their largest quarterly increase ever. This paper explores trends on the caseload growth and pandemic policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. TANF and SNAP caseloads initially rose sharply by 10 and 18 percent, but...

There is hardly any study on learning inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic in a low-income, multi-country context. Analyzing 34 longitudinal household and phone survey rounds from Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, we find that while countries exhibit...

This paper investigates the role of large-outbreaks on the persistence of COVID-19 over time. Using data from 649 European regions in 14 countries, I first show that school-breaks in late February/early March (weeks 8, 9 and 10) led to large regional outbreaks of COVID-19 in the spring with the...

How does contagion risk affect the business cycle? We find that the presence of contagion risk significantly alters the transmission of standard macroeconomic shocks. Relative to the first-best equilibrium, the contagion externality significantly reduces the response of output to a technology...

Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are the primary measures to control pandemics. Should regional governments coordinate in implementing NPIs? If so, how? The answers depend on spatial spillovers and complementarity or substitutability of regional NPIs. This paper estimates the spillover...

We examine how policymakers react to a pandemic with uncertainty regarding key epidemiological parameters by embedding a macroeconomic SIR model in a robust control framework. We find that optimal policy under uncertainty generates optimal mitigation responses that are asymmetric with respect to...